"Where else but chez Madame Girardin could you find such exquisite company as George Sand, Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac? In Edwardian London, Lady Desborough's 'Souls' group was frequented by Lord Curzon, Oscar Wilde and H.G. Wells. Max Eastman has said that at Mabel Dodge's Greenwich Village salon 'Everybody in the ferment of ideas could be found'--actress Eleanora Duse, recent Ivy League graduate Walter Lippmann, then unknown Gertrude Stein, poets Amy Lowell and E.A. Robinson, early feminist Margaret Sanger, radicals Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and the dashing activist John Reed, with whom Mabel fell in love. In these thirteen essays such eminent writers and biographers as Victoria Glendinning, Harold Acton, Bruce Cook and Robert A. Rosenstone recreate the drama and 'ferment of ideas' of the salon--certainly one of the most unique institutions Westem culture has known. The rarely mentioned hostesses in whose drawing rooms the avant-garde in politics, literature and art gathered are revealed as subtle and sophisticated manipulators of the stormy personalities and often passionate intellectual exchanges. Salons have all but vanished, but vivid memories of them have not. Their stories, and the stories they inspired, form an interesting part of the history of high society in the past two centuries. Here, in brief evocations accompanied by photographs and illustrations, some of the glitter, the wit and the controversy surrounding the greatest salons--in London, Paris, Berlin, Prague and on both American coasts--is brought back to life."--Jacket.